The Magician | Page 4

gardens of the Luxembourg. Dr Porhoët walked with stooping
shoulders, his hands behind him. He beheld the scene with the eyes of
the many painters who have sought by means of the most charming
garden in Paris to express their sense of beauty. The grass was scattered
with the fallen leaves, but their wan decay little served to give a touch
of nature to the artifice of all besides. The trees were neatly surrounded
by bushes, and the bushes by trim beds of flowers. But the trees grew
without abandonment, as though conscious of the decorative scheme
they helped to form. It was autumn, and some were leafless already.
Many of the flowers were withered. The formal garden reminded one
of a light woman, no longer young, who sought, with faded finery, with
powder and paint, to make a brave show of despair. It had those false,
difficult smiles of uneasy gaiety, and the pitiful graces which attempt a
fascination that the hurrying years have rendered vain.
Dr Porhoët drew more closely round his fragile body the heavy cloak
which even in summer he could not persuade himself to discard. The
best part of his life had been spent in Egypt, in the practice of medicine,
and the frigid summers of Europe scarcely warmed his blood. His
memory flashed for an instant upon those multi-coloured streets of
Alexandria; and then, like a homing bird, it flew to the green woods
and the storm-beaten coasts of his native Brittany. His brown eyes were
veiled with sudden melancholy.
'Let us wait here for a moment,' he said.

They took two straw-bottomed chairs and sat near the octagonal water
which completes with its fountain of Cupids the enchanting artificiality
of the Luxembourg. The sun shone more kindly now, and the trees
which framed the scene were golden and lovely. A balustrade of stone
gracefully enclosed the space, and the flowers, freshly bedded, were
very gay. In one corner they could see the squat, quaint towers of Saint
Sulpice, and on the other side the uneven roofs of the Boulevard Saint
Michel.
The palace was grey and solid. Nurses, some in the white caps of their
native province, others with the satin streamers of the nounou, marched
sedately two by two, wheeling perambulators and talking. Brightly
dressed children trundled hoops or whipped a stubborn top. As he
watched them, Dr Porhoët's lips broke into a smile, and it was so tender
that his thin face, sallow from long exposure to subtropical suns, was
transfigured. He no longer struck you merely as an insignificant little
man with hollow cheeks and a thin grey beard; for the weariness of
expression which was habitual to him vanished before the charming
sympathy of his smile. His sunken eyes glittered with a kindly but
ironic good-humour. Now passed a guard in the romantic cloak of a
brigand in comic opera and a peaked cap like that of an alguacil. A
group of telegraph boys in blue stood round a painter, who was making
a sketch--notwithstanding half-frozen fingers. Here and there, in baggy
corduroys, tight jackets, and wide-brimmed hats, strolled students who
might have stepped from the page of Murger's immortal romance. But
the students now are uneasy with the fear of ridicule, and more often
they walk in bowler hats and the neat coats of the boulevardier.
Dr Porhoët spoke English fluently, with scarcely a trace of foreign
accent, but with an elaboration which suggested that he had learned the
language as much from study of the English classics as from
conversation.
'And how is Miss Dauncey?' he asked, turning to his friend.
Arthur Burdon smiled.
'Oh, I expect she's all right. I've not seen her today, but I'm going to tea

at the studio this afternoon, and we want you to dine with us at the
Chien Noir.'
'I shall be much pleased. But do you not wish to be by yourselves?'
'She met me at the station yesterday, and we dined together. We talked
steadily from half past six till midnight.'
'Or, rather, she talked and you listened with the delighted attention of a
happy lover.'
Arthur Burdon had just arrived in Paris. He was a surgeon on the staff
of St Luke's, and had come ostensibly to study the methods of the
French operators; but his real object was certainly to see Margaret
Dauncey. He was furnished with introductions from London surgeons
of repute, and had already spent a morning at the Hôtel Dieu, where the
operator, warned that his visitor was a bold and skilful surgeon, whose
reputation in England was already considerable, had sought to dazzle
him by feats that savoured almost of legerdemain. Though the hint of
charlatanry in the Frenchman's methods had not escaped Arthur
Burdon's shrewd eyes, the audacious sureness of his hand